The Daily BlagueWe thought you'd know2014-09-03T14:09:04Zhttp://www.dailyblague.com/blog/?feed=atomWordPressRJKhttp://www.portifex.comhttp://www.dailyblague.com/blog/?p=106752014-09-03T14:09:04Z2014-09-03T14:09:04Z¶ We could have looked it up, but we didn’t do more, whenever the word “endorphin” came up, than frown. What a funny-looking word. Derived from what, possibly? “End-” was vaguely Greek, but the rest was gibberish.

Now we know. In a fantastic piece about the seesawing problems of pill and heroin abuseon Staten Island, Ian Frazier writes about the “antagonistic” opioid naloxone, which, injected by nasal spray, saves lives that might be lost to drug overdoses. Naloxone was discovered in Queens, and promptly led to important discoveries.

If naloxone could reverse pain relief when no drugs were present, researchers guessed that the body must have its own pain-relief systems. “Endorphin,” the word, comes from “endogenous morphine.” A number of such natural chemicals were later found, along with receptors in the brain upon which they and the opioids acted. Other studies showed that naloxone may block the pain-relieving effects of acupuncture and placebos, temporarily suppress the urge to eat, and reduce the body’s shock and stress reactions.

We have no suggestions for an improved word, but dropping the “m” in “morphine” was an illiterate move.

]]>0RJKhttp://www.portifex.comhttp://www.dailyblague.com/blog/?p=106702014-09-02T13:43:18Z2014-09-02T13:43:18Z¶ While the Editor was on vacation, Nick Bilton published a piece in the Times about the tweetfall from Ferguson that captured the gist of our misgivings about the replacement of professionally digested news by amateurs’ eyewitness accounts.

When Mr. Carson of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch shared pictures on Twitter of a Molotov cocktail found by the police, Twitter users accused him of lying and making it up. One group even perpetuated a hashtag #mythicalmolotov. When he said he had GoPro footage of protesters firing bullets at the police, naysayers said it was simply fireworks.

Maybe this alternative reality won’t be a surprise to anyone. A survey by Rasmussen Reports nine days after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown found that half of those surveyed had already made up their minds as to who was at fault. By that reckoning, it doesn’t matter what the facts are, people are going to find the tweets that support their viewpoint.

]]>0RJKhttp://www.portifex.comhttp://www.dailyblague.com/blog/?p=106652014-07-31T15:48:06Z2014-07-31T15:48:06Z¶ At Aeon, Kristin Ohlson writes beguilingly about memories of childhood— how rare the truly early ones are, and how completely they are overshadowed by those of adolescence and early adulthood. (3 Quarks Daily; via The Morning News)

To form long-term memories, an array of biological and psychological stars must align, and most children lack the machinery for this alignment. The raw material of memory – the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile sensations of our life experiences – arrive and register across the cerebral cortex, the seat of cognition. For these to become memory, they must undergo bundling in the hippocampus, a brain structure named for its supposed resemblance to a sea horse, located under the cerebral cortex. The hippocampus not only bundles multiple input from our senses together into a single new memory, it also links these sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations to similar ones already stored in the brain. But some parts of the hippocampus aren’t fully developed until we’re adolescents, making it hard for a child’s brain to complete this process.

‘So much has to happen biologically to store a memory,’ the psychologist Patricia Bauer of Emory University told me. There’s ‘a race to get it stabilised and consolidated before you forget it. It’s like making Jell-O: you mix the stuff up, you put it in a mould, and you put it in the refrigerator to set, but your mould has a tiny hole in it. You just hope your Jell-O – your memory – gets set before it leaks out through that tiny hole.’

In addition, young children have a tenuous grip on chronology. They are years from mastering clocks and calendars, and thus have a hard time nailing an event to a specific time and place. They also don’t have the vocabulary to describe an event, and without that vocabulary, they can’t create the kind of causal narrative that Peterson found at the root of a solid memory. And they don’t have a greatly elaborated sense of self, which would encourage them to hoard and reconsider chunks of experience as part of a growing life-narrative.

]]>0RJKhttp://www.portifex.comhttp://www.dailyblague.com/blog/?p=106592014-07-29T14:42:24Z2014-07-29T14:42:24Z¶ John Lanchester’s “Money Talks,” appearing in this week’s New Yorker, could have been written (perhaps a trifle overwritten) by our Editor, who is forever haranguing his readers to sit up, pay heed, and learn how the world really turns. Lanchester’s argument is all the more urgent for concerning money, not culture. For fifty years, sophisticated discussion of the dismal science been abandoned to traders with a stake in it. If this high-minded dereliction was intended to starve finance of life-sustaining attention, it failed more than dismally.

The language of money is a powerful tool, and it is also a tool of power. Incomprehension is a form of consent. If we allow ourselves not to understand this language, we are signing off on the way the world works today—in particular, we are signing off on the prospect of an ever-widening gap between the rich and everyone else, a world in which everything about your life is determined by the accident of who your parents are. Those of us who are interested in stopping that from happening need to learn how to measure the level of the Nile for ourselves.

When you read the piece, you’ll see how the Nile flows into it.

]]>2RJKhttp://www.portifex.comhttp://www.dailyblague.com/blog/?p=106552014-07-28T16:00:19Z2014-07-28T16:00:19Z¶ What makes human people so special in America? They’re the ones who pay most of the taxes. Corporate people pay much less. Our current regulatory scheme, flourishing under right-wing nurture, favors the dispensation in many ways, most currently in the vogue for “inversion,” whereby an American company buys a foreign one but claims that it was the other way round, so that profits not generated in the US are not taxed. (I remember when, four or five years ago, Chinese firms launched a vogue for these transactions, not for tax purposes but in order to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Global Boulevard is a two-way street.) Paul Krugman takes a crack at inversionin his column in today’s Times.

The most important thing to understand about inversion is that it does not in any meaningful sense involve American business “moving overseas.” Consider the case of Walgreen, the giant drugstore chain that, according to multiple reports, is on the verge of making itself legally Swiss. If the plan goes through, nothing about the business will change; your local pharmacy won’t close and reopen in Zurich. It will be a purely paper transaction — but it will deprive the U.S. government of several billion dollars in revenue that you, the taxpayer, will have to make up one way or another.

Does this mean President Obama is wrong to describe companies engaging in inversion as “corporate deserters”? Not really — they’re shirking their civic duty, and it doesn’t matter whether they literally move abroad or not. But apologists for inversion, who tend to claim that high taxes are driving businesses out of America, are indeed talking nonsense. These businesses aren’t moving production or jobs overseas — and they’re still earning their profits right here in the U.S.A. All they’re doing is dodging taxes on those profits.

And Congress could crack down on this tax dodge — it’s already illegal for a company to claim that its legal domicile is someplace where it has little real business, and tightening the criteria for declaring a company non-American could block many of the inversions now taking place. So is there any reason not to stop this gratuitous loss of revenue? No.

We think that official tolerance of inversion is the strongest evidence to date that American government is depraved.

]]>0RJKhttp://www.portifex.comhttp://www.dailyblague.com/blog/?p=106512014-07-25T15:06:06Z2014-07-25T15:06:06ZAt Smart Set, Willard Spiegelman meditates on the importance of quiet in museums. (Not surprisingly, perhaps, he encountered it memorably last fall at the installation of Janet Cardiff’s Forty Part Motet at the Cloisters.) His advice: don’t wait for noisy gawkers to go away. Just stand still and firm; the racket will recede on its own, as you radiate the quiet.

Every so often a miracle occurs. The crowds vanish. Perhaps no one is around to begin with as was the case for me in Philadelphia. Or perhaps something marvelous so transports the viewer that he can forget the crowds, noisy or inconvenient though they may be. At New York’s Frick Collection last winter, I waited for a spot to open and I just planted myself in front of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, on loan from the Netherlands, until I had looked my fill. I made myself ignore my noisy, jostling neighbors. The thrill of slow looking has also happened when I come to an art exhibition that changes my mind about an artist I never knew well: Kandinsky; Arshile Gorky, most recently. Or that opens my eyes to an artist of whom I have previously known nothing at all: Howard Hodgkin, for example, first in Fort Worth and then at the Metropolitan Museum; L. S. Lowry, at Tate Britain last summer. A world opens itself up and invites you in. The surroundings melt and it’s just you and the pictures. These things happen. Keats described the experience as feeling that a new planet has swum into your ken. He was thinking of literature — in his case George Chapman’s translations of Homer — but the analogy obtains.

]]>1RJKhttp://www.portifex.comhttp://www.dailyblague.com/blog/?p=106442014-07-23T15:39:56Z2014-07-23T15:39:56Z¶ In today’s Dealbook, Steven Davidoff Solomon notes that huge business combines have roared backinto existence notwithstanding the anti-trust legislation that was designed to stifle them at birth. This has happened because the new megafirms are not nearly as interested in eliminating competition as their Gilded Age predecessors were. What the new behemoths crave is not monopoly but political power — the negative political power to retain their freedom to do as they wish.

Every industry now has its own Washington-based nonprofit to push its agenda. For wireless it is CTIA, and for cable it is the National Cable & Telecommunications Association. There is even an e-cigarettes group called the Electronic Cigarette Industry Group. The new megacorporations, simply by virtue of their size, can use these organizations to lobby for significant change. And with the political-spending rights given to them by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision, these corporations are even more powerful. They are able to steer large sums to preferred candidates. Though they have yet to flex that muscle to the extent that they might, the fear that they could do so is enough to give these companies significant political power with politicians.

This accretion of power is manifestly undesirable — is it not? Solomon is right (if unrealistic) to call for a legislative overhaul.

]]>1RJKhttp://www.portifex.comhttp://www.dailyblague.com/blog/?p=106392014-07-21T23:09:44Z2014-07-22T11:59:39ZWe try to learn something every day. This is easiest when we turn our attention to economics, a field of almost immeasurable ignorance for us. Today, we discovered Karl Polanyi, author of The Great Transformation and the subject of a new book by Fred Block and Margaret Somers. Block and Somers were interviewed by Henry Farrell at the Washington Post. (via 3 Quarks Daily)

HF - How do those ideas help us understand the vexing economic problems we still face today?

FB & MS – By putting government and politics into the center of economic analysis, Polanyi makes it clear that today’s vexing economic problems are almost entirely political problems. This can effectively change the terms of modern political debate: Both left and right today focus on “deregulation”—for the right it is a rallying cry against the impediments of government; for the left it is the scourge behind our current economic inequities. While they differ dramatically on its desirability, both positions assume the possibility of a “non-regulated” or “non-political” market. Taking Polanyi seriously means rejecting the illusion of a “deregulated” economy. What happened in the name of “deregulation” has actually been “reregulation,” this time by rules and policies that are radically different from those of the New Deal and Great Society decades. Although compromised by racism, those older regulations laid the groundwork for greater equality and a flourishing middle class. Government continues to regulate, but instead of acting to protect workers, consumers, and citizens, it devised new policies aimed to help giant corporate and financial institutions maximize their returns through revised anti-trust laws, seemingly bottomless bank bailouts, and increased impediments to unionization.

The implications for political discourse are critically important: If regulations are always necessary components of markets, we must not discuss regulation versus deregulation but rather what kinds of regulations we prefer: Those designed to benefit wealth and capital? Or those that benefit the public and common good? Similarly, since the rights or lack of rights that employees have at the workplace are always defined by the legal system, we must not ask whether the law should organize the labor market but rather what kinds of rules and rights should be entailed in these laws—those that recognize that it is the skills and talents of employees that make firms productive, or those that rig the game in favor of employers and private profits?

This puts a new name to a few ideas that we happen to endorse, and makes them clearer, too.

]]>0RJKhttp://www.portifex.comhttp://www.dailyblague.com/blog/?p=106332014-07-21T16:33:37Z2014-07-21T16:31:15Z¶ At Pacific Standard, Casy Cep reviews her correspondence with Daniel Bloom, an American gadfly currently living in Taiwan. The object of their correspondence, as yet not absolutely resolved, was to demonstrate that the publicity story that accompanied the English translation of Min Kamp — that Karl Ove Knausgaard’s epic autobiography was so popular that all discussion of it in the Norwegian workplace had to be prohibited in order to get anything done — was, to put it mildly, an exaggeration, tipping into patent untruth, that ought never to have been reprinted by reputable newspapers and magazines. In the course of her piece, however, Cep repeats another unfounded myth, all the more meretricious for being about the book itself.

And what did it matter? I’d long decided Bloom was a more interesting story than Knausgaard, whose own work documented every inch of his own life.

Knausgaard is in fact far too good a writer to waste his time on such a documentary project. We don’t understand why it is so fashionable to deny — as the author himself seems inclined to do — Knausgaard’s artistry.

]]>6RJKhttp://www.portifex.comhttp://www.dailyblague.com/blog/?p=106292014-07-18T16:03:02Z2014-07-18T16:03:02Z¶ At TLS, Sarah Graham (currently at work on a book about Salinger’s short fiction) reviews Laurence Buell’s The Dream of the Great American Novel, and Buell’s approach to that dream, which carefully avoids the selection of one great American novel, sounds both comprehensive and intriguing. According to Graham, Buell sorts novels into four headings, or “scripts”:

Novels “made classic by retelling,” such as those concerned with the “ordeals of immigrant transplantation,” ranging from The Scarlet Letter through The Holder of the World.

“Up From” Novels. The great novels written to this template are extremely ironic about success. The Great Gatsby, late Roth.

Novels that “romance the divides” — between groups and races. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Beloved

Meganovels, in which a cast of characters collaborates on a massive project. Moby-Dick, Gravity’s Rainbow.

Graham concludes that Moby-Dick is “the most likely contender” for Great American Novel — a book that we find pervasively rubbishy and steeply unreadable, unquestionably the worst book on any syllabus. (via 3 Quarks Daily)